“Developers and designers are reimaging the familiar on the web. Join us in celebrating their work,” the invite reads.

To promote the event, Microsoft has also launched a site at www.beautyoftheweb.com where invitees have to type in the letters to to unlock the invitation (hint: it’s “native”). There’s not much to see here otherwise, but the site does unveil IE9’s new, shinier logo. Pretty!

We do know a lot about the upcoming browser thanks to extensive blog posts from the IE team regarding its support for web standards, including HTML 5 and CSS3. It will also offer hardware acceleration and an improved, internal JavaScript engine called “Chakra.”

What we don’t know is what IE 9 will actually look like but rumors are already circulating with speculations about that topic. Guess we have to wait to find out for sure.

In this newest preview, developers have a chance to check out IE9’s fully hardware-accelerated HTML5 implementation and test drive samples of modern SVG and native JavaScript in action.

And as before, the applications made available for testing purposes are fun for developers and non-developers alike. For example, there’s a Hamster Dance Revolution game, the musical IE Beatz, and the Psychedelic Browsing app which shows off hardware acceleration’s capabilities.

Continued improvements to the Javascript engine are measured using the Webkit Sunspider benchmark and the results, charted here, and they’re encouraging. IE9 has come a long, long way from IE8, that’s for sure. And the differences between IE9 and other modern web browsers on this microbenchmark are converging within thousandths of seconds, the post notes.

Also in the latest preview, IE’s score on the Acid3 test improves from 83 to 95, which is also good news.

This preview is the last one before IE launches its beta, so developers and designers need to get their sites ready soon. There are some tips on doing so listed at the bottom of the page here.

In the latest release, the feature spotlight is on the browser’s support for the HTML5 web standard, with its included support for the HTML5 Canvas element, audio and video tags. Several new demos show off these features, including one called the “IMDb Video Panorama.”

Through a partnership with Amazon (which owns IMDb), Microsoft created a fun, interactive video showcase application which lets you scroll through trailers for current and upcoming movies.

Another Amazon app, the “Amazon Shelf,” presents a virtual bookshelf with interactive features that let you flip through pages of a book to see reviews, ratings, snippets, price and other info available from Amazon.com.

Other improvements in this release include performance increases for JavaScript and additional standards support, including the Web Open Font Format. See videos of IE9 in action on Channel 9.

For example, under the speed demos section, you’ll find the gorgeous visual search engine demo called Flickr Explorer, a game called Browser Flip, and the Star Wars-esque Scrolling Text demo.

There are also four new HTML5 demos showing off things like CSS3 media queries, DOM range and selection and more plus graphics demos using diagrams, org charts and even a tweet cloud, where you can hover over Twitter search terms floating in clouds to view more information about a randomly selected tweet.

Interested developers can grab the latest preview from here.

As previously announced, the new browser will support HTML5, CSS3, and hardware acceleration. It also sports a new JavaScript engine called “Chakra.” You can read more about its improvements and how to send feedback over on the IE blog here.

When you first launch the IE9 preview browser, you’re taken to the IE9 Test Drive website where you’ll find a series of tests ready to be run. There are speed demos for testing browser performance, graphics demos, and HTML5 demos for testing border radius, CSS2, DOM Style, and DOM events. There’s also an “HTML 5 T-Shirt Designer” app that uses HTML5 and XHTML to let you create your own shirt.

Internet Explorer 9

Arguably one of the bigger announcements from PDC, Steven Sinofsky gave attendees a first look at what’s coming in IE9 with a demo of an early build. The updated browser will support new web standards including HTML5 and CSS3 and will also have a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky admitted that JavaScript performance in IE8 was much slower than other browsers and it’s clear that addressing this problem was a key goal for the IE9 team. A post on the IE blog shows a chart comparing the script performance on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Although still a test build, IE9 has narrowed the gap considerably when it comes to speed:

The new browser will also include “hardware accelerated rendering” which means it will now render graphics and text using the graphics card instead of the CPU. For the end user, this means that online images, videos, animations, and web fonts will be displayed faster, more clearly, and will use less CPU in the process of doing so. This is one of the better features of IE9 as it takes advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite technologies to do something that today’s other browsers don’t – and it’s more useful than both Google's Native Client and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, said Dean Hachamovitch, IE’s GM.

Office 2010

At PDC, Office 2010 launched into beta along with SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps. Office has been given a new look with updated logos and icons, but the most exciting development is the Outlook Social Connector. With this tool, you can track conversations and stay up-to-date with everyone you communicate with via email without having to switch over to another program or website.

Likely inspired by the demands for more social inbox experiences provided by plugins like Xobni as well as third-party services like Gist, the Social Connector will also focus on social network and email integration. As with Xobni, the connector tracks your communication history with your email contacts, your upcoming meetings, and it helps you easily find attachments they may have sent. It also offers activity feeds for each person based on their actions on both business and consumer social networks, including SharePoint 2010’s new social features and Windows Live. 

The first consumer network to support the new feature is LinkedIn, the professional business networking site. With the LinkedIn integration, you’ll be able to track your connections, email them, send invites, and more.

The Social Connector is available now in the Office 2010 beta and the LinkedIn integration will go live early next year.

Silverlight 4

Another major announcement was the developer release of the Silverlight 4 public beta. The updated platform includes a number of new features like webcam and microphone support for sharing audio and video in Silverlight apps, performance improvements that allow it to run 200% faster than Silverlight 3, support for Google Chrome, Deep Zoom enhancements, multi-touch support, and the ability to bring data into the app via copy/paste or drag-and-drop. For example, you could now drag an Office document into a Silverlight application, if desired.

To show off the new capabilities, a Silverlight Facebook app was demonstrated (TechCrunch has the screenshots).  In the app, cycling through the photos was a much faster experience that what it would be in the browser.

Silverlight 4 is a developer release only so no end-user runtime is being provided at this time.

Pivot

Pivot is a new Microsoft Live Labs experience that lets you interact with “massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.” Essentially, it’s a visualization tool for organizing datasets to discover new patterns and insights. The tool, built in SeaDragon and powered by Silverlight, does the visualization over the web. In other words, it’s streaming the data, not caching it locally to your hard drive.

In Pivot, datasets are organized as collections which are displayed using thumbnail images. The collections consist of objects that share some common attributes. In Pivot, you can analyze all these objects in a broader context. For example, as the video explains on Pivot’s homepage, they used Pivot to look at all of social lending organization Kiva’s loans and sort them by loan type.

Another example of Pivot in action is Brandon Watson’s Crunchbase Viewer which allows you to sort through the massive amounts of data stored in the online database about internet startups.

In order to use Pivot, you need an invite. You can request one here.

In addition, new enhancements have been added to the Cooliris Internet Explorer plugin to improve performance. According to the company, image searches’ performance have improved up to 30% with the updated plugin.

The company also reports that they will soon support Bing Video searches, too, but have not revealed an exact date yet.

To download Cooliris, visit the company homepage here: cooliris.com.

This second method is actually a great way to make a web slice for any RSS feed you want to track in your browser – and you don’t need to code or do anything technical to create this one. In fact, all you have to do is go to the LiveSlices gallery and click the “Install” button next to the “Feed Slice” option. Then you can just enter the URL of the RSS feed you want to follow. Once the feed is verified, you just add it to your Favorites bar. Here's the one Amit made, as an example.

Note that feed slices won’t include your site’s favicon and you won’t know how many people subscribe. Still, it’s a much simpler way of creating a Web Slice without needing to have any technical knowledge.

If you haven’t been testing the beta, today you can download the the updated browser and see what you’ve been missing. There are several new features being introduced, including a private browsing mode, a visual search tool, colorful tabs, a smart bar, as well as interactive features like web slices and accelerators.

Upon First Launch…

You’ll notice the differences between IE7 and IE8 right away when you launch the new browser today. As you surf and open additional tabs, you’ll see that tabs are grouped together when they’re launched via links from one particular website. Those tabs are also color-coded so you can tell which tabs are associated with each other. This is handy for anyone who does a lot of research on the web or who just likes to have a lot of tabs open at the same time. It’s also a feature that other browsers don’t do – at least, not right out of the box. Although add-ons and extensions can deliver that functionality to some other browsers, that doesn’t mean as much to a good part of the web surfing population who use their web browsers “as is” with little customization.

There are other UI changes, too, which will help out those “non-tweakers.” For example, the new Favorites Bar (formerly called the “Links” Bar) in IE8 is now switched on by default. With one click on the star with the green arrow, favorite websites can be added to this bar without having to fuss with the whole bookmarks manager setup. Just click and the bookmark appears at the top of the window.

Another button at the top near the favorites bar is called “Quick Tabs.” It’s almost small enough to go unnoticed so it stays out of the way, but at some point even the most non-observant web surfer will give this button an accidental click. That’s all it will take to make using this new feature a part of their daily routine. Here, websites are laid out as live-updating and good-sized thumbnail images of the sites that are open in your tabs. It’s an easy way to navigate through a myriad of open tabs and find the one you need.

Also, IE8 takes advantage of tabbed browsing to deliver relevant content when you click the “new tab” button, conveniently available to the right of all your open tabs. Instead of just presenting you with blank white space, it asks “what do you want to do next?” and suggests various tasks like launching an “InPrivate” window, use an Accelerator, or re-open a closed tab. (That last option is going to be very useful for those of us with too-fast trigger fingers when it comes to closing tabs.)

Speaking of “InPrivate,” that option is also a new IE8 feature which launches you into a private browsing session where none of your activity is tracked. No history, no saved passwords, no temporary internet files, no saved form information, no saved visited URLs,…nothing.  Of course, you’ll have to remember to close the browser before this info is wiped, but it’s definitely handy for surfing from publicly shared machines or anywhere you’re concerned about leaving traces of your activity.

Two of the features getting the most attention in IE8, however, are two of the most unique: “Web Slices” and “Accelerators.” Web Slices are sort of like really smart, live bookmarks. You add them to your bookmark bar as you would any other site, but instead of taking you to another web page when you click them, they display a small window with live web content. Because they work in real time, they can be used for keeping tabs on an auction, for example, as you can with the eBay Web Slice, or for keeping track of the current weather, among many other things.

Accelerators, the other big new feature in IE8, are designed to help you better interact with whatever web content you’re browsing. When you highlight text on a web page and right-click, you’ll see a list of actions you can take using that content. For example, you can blog it, map it, search it, email it, etc. There are a slew of accelerators to choose from so you can customize this menu to include your favorite services. I particularly like the ones like “Share on Facebook” and “Google Define,” as they both speed up the process of performing online actions which I do nearly every day.

The web slices and accelerators are found in the IE8 add-ons gallery, where they’re grouped along with search providers by category and popularity in well-organized and clean category pages. Each item has a button called “Add to Internet Explorer” which, upon clicking, pops up a window where all you have to do is click an “Add” button to confirm your choice.

Another change that makes browsing faster is the new “Smart Address Bar” which pulls up the addresses and sites from your browsing history as you begin to type – a feature that is a nod to an IE8 competitor, Firefox 3.0. The search box also does the same.

However, the search box has some nifty tricks of its own – and ones that are also unique to IE8, the best perhaps being its capability to do visual searches. Start typing in the search box and along with suggested searches related to your item, you’ll also see images. This is thanks to IE8’s new “visual search” feature which displays images within the search box itself.

The search box also lets you quickly switch from one search provider to another, a feature that lets you not only try your search on other search engines (cough, live.com, cough), but also lets you search within particular sites as well. For example, you can click on “Amazon” to search for your keyword on that site or “New York Times” to just search just that online news source. And all you have to do is click the search provider button to re-search -  you don’t have to retype your keyword or hit enter – IE8 will just re-run the search for you.

The available sites you can add as search providers are also found on the IE8 Add-ons site. For visual searches, look for Add-ons that identify themselves as “visual search” in their title, like this Wikipedia one or this Freebase one.

Finally, because IE8 is focused on being standards-compliant, pages on the web designed for the less-compliant older versions of IE may display oddly if they haven’t been re-coded for IE8. I haven’t encountered too many occurrences of this since most developers have already made the necessary changes – especially on larger sites run by businesses. But if you stumble upon the occasional, older web page a quick click on the “compatibility button” located next to the Address Bar will re-display page correctly.

With all these new tricks, it’s clear that IE is not only a big improvement over its previous incarnations, it’s now even a worthy competitor to the large number of other browsers out there. For all those who use IE regularly, the upgrade will be a pleasant surprise. And for those who had moved away in favor of other browsers, IE8 has introduced several features that may even win back some of those switchers.

IE8 is available now for users of Windows XP and Vista. A special version for beta testers of Windows 7 will arrive later on with the next update to that OS.

Also see David Tesar's post Top 5 Reasons for IT Pros to Deploy.

The new Liveslices site is not a Microsoft-owned property, but the look of its design has a similar feel to those sites we’re seeing in the Microsoft family of websites, including the one for IE 8. (Right down to the same font!) In other words, it has a clean and simple layout.

When you click into the Liveslices gallery, you’re presented with a list of Webslices to choose from and the company promises that they’re going to keep adding to this list.

The ones they currently have available are pretty cool – there are Webslices for Flickr, Twitter, feeds, Gmail, CNN, MSNBC, and more. My favorites (clearly) are the Twitter, Gmail, and Feed ones. With the Gmail and Twitter slices, you can click to see the latest from both your Twitter account and your inbox. The feed one is also great for keep up with your favorite sites. Photogs will love the two Flickr slices for checking out the most interesting photos and the uploads from everyone.

Although the site is brand-new, it’s clearly off to a good start. Got any suggestions for how they can improve? You can leave a comment on their blog here.

The service also includes a scheduler function if you want to keep an eye on a web page that changes a lot. Instead of having to return day-after-day to take a new snapshot, you can configure Iterasi to do so for you.

To get the new add-on for Internet Explorer, head over to the Iterasi download page. The browser extension works in IE 7 and IE 8 on XP and Vista (and likely Windows 7 Beta, too.)

Thanks @corvida!

If you’ve never used Foxmarks before, you should check out Lifehacker’s informative “how to” guide before installing. If you’re already familiar with the add-on, you can just go grab the IE download from here.

With the FriendFeed Accelerator, you can capture text on a web page and send it to straight to FriendFeed’s share page with pre-filled fields. The Accelerator will grab the URL and title of the page as the text.

If you haven’t checked out Accelerators yet, you should. They are one of my favorite new features in IE8. So far, I’ve installed Accelerators for Sharing, including ones that let me share to Facebook, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and of course, Hotmail. I’ve also added Search Accelerators like Find on Facebook and Find on LinkedIn as well as those that let me search Wikipedia, Amazon, and New York Times.

You can find these and more in the IE8 Add-ons Gallery.

If you’re still running IE7, the high-level changes you’ll notice in the new IE8 include increased speed, increased responsiveness, and overall improved stability. However, it’s the new features like Accelerators and Web Slices that are getting the most attention.

Accelerators

The new IE8 includes something called “accelerators” which help speed up web activities like searches, finding a place on a map, blogging, and more. These are all available just by highlighting the text you want to act on, then right-clicking. A list of accelerators will appear. Several are built-in to the browser by default and developers can also extend the browser by creating their own and offering them as a download.

Web Slices

Another big new feature is “web slices.” These are special sorts of bookmarks (sort of) that you can add to your favorites bar. When clicked, these bookmarks don’t redirect you to a new page, but rather display portions of a web page in a small but easy-to-read window that appears. They’re great for keeping up with things like headlines or weather without having to navigate away from the site you’re on.

And More...

Also new in IE8 is private browsing, improved inline search, an improved search bar, automatic crash recovery, and tab groups. 

What You Need to Know About RC1

Specifically, in IE8 RC1:

1. If you are a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 user and you are upgrading from IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2 to IE8 RC1, you are no longer required to manually uninstall earlier IE8 builds. Instead, IE8 RC1 installer will automatically upgrade your machine from the earlier IE8 builds to the latest IE8 build, all with a single reboot.
2. There is a new pre-requisite for IE8 RC1 (KB957388). This update supersedes KB943302 and KB957055 and will be automatically installed as part of your RC1 upgrade, as long as you keep “Install the latest updates” checkbox checked. This update addresses known application compatibility issues in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 and improves the performance and reliability of IE8.
3. All IE8 Beta 1 and Beta 2 users will be offered IE8 RC1 via Windows Update in 25 languages. For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the IE language that gets offered via Windows Update will match the base OS language. For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the IE language that gets offered via Windows Update will match the Active Language that the user selected for their account.

You can get more information about system requirements and installation on the IE Blog. Also, be sure to check out the IE 8 video over on TechNet Edge.

For previous IE8 coverage here on Channel 10, check out our IE 8 First Look video for a run down of what's new.

If you are using Delicious now, you can join the conversation on the forum where you can share your own thoughts and suggestions.

Smart Address Bar: Taking a note from Firefox 3’s  Awesome Bar, the Smart Address Bar offers suggestions as you type based on website history, favorites, and RSS feed. There’s even an autocomplete feature that will suggest sites based on what you’re typing. Domain highlighting is also used to highlight the domain name. This feature allows for improved security and is especially useful in thwarting phishing attacks.

Colored Tab Groups: When you Ctrl+Click a link to open up a new tab, the new tab will have the same color as the original tab. New tabs that you launch on your own will be in a different color. This feature helps you easily visualize how tabs are related to each other.

Enhanced Find On Page Search: Ctrl+F launches a Find-on-Page Toolbar at the top of the page underneath the tabs. Search terms on the page are highlighted and the number of times they appear are counted.

Switching Search Providers Easier: Now when you enter in a search term in the search box, you’ll notice a row of icons that appear below the search suggestions that appear. These icons allow you to change your search provider on the fly from Live Search to Google to Wikipedia to Amazon, eBay, and more…all with the click of a button.

Visual Search: In addition to being able to change providers quickly, sites that support visual search (currently Amazon and Wikipedia) will display a small thumbnail image of the results which you can view without having to visit that page. What a timesaver!

Crash Recovery/Session Saving: You now have the option to reopen the last tab group when closing the browser. Also, if a tab crashes, crash recovery will restore the tab as well as any info you had filled in there such as in the case of writing an email or filing out a form.

InPrivate Browsing: This new technology lets you browse privately, making sure that history, temporary internet files, and cookies are not recorded on the PC

Other new features include an updated look for the IE chrome, improvements to both web slices and accelerators (formerly called “activities”), tools for IT professionals and developers, and a lot more. You can check out the full list of enhancements here as well as read reviews from both Ed Bott and Brandon LeBlanc, who both take a comprehensive look at the new browser.

If you haven’t yet tried out PicLens, then you’re missing out on one of the hottest web add-ons I’ve seen in a long time. This web browser add-on (available for IE here), literally transforms the web in an immersive experience, allowing you to browse through images and videos in a full-screen 3D view. When you’re on a page with videos or photos, you click on a little arrow that appears on your page thanks to the PicLens IE plugin and you’re zoomed into a full-screen, scrollable “wall” of media. In this “wall,” you can fly through photos or videos by scrolling with your mouse, and when you’re done “Esc” or “X” out and you’ll be back on the web page you started from.

The latest version of the PicLens plugin offers a “Discover” feature which lets you launch PicLens and use it as a media player of sorts. Here, you can watch movie trailers, get the latest news, view photos, and browse video feeds. Another newer addition is the “Shop Amazon” feature, which lets you virtually browse through products from Amazon.

Once you try PicLens, you’re going to love it, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, I suggest you download it now. This is rapidly becoming my absolute favorite plugin of all time.

In May, Yahoo released a beta version of their Del.icio.us plugin for Internet Explorer which provided toolbar buttons for saving and tagging links, searching del.icio.us, and even syncing links from your browser’s favorites to the del.icio.us bookmarking service. Recently, Yahoo released the official version of the plugin – version 1.0 – which is now available for download here. This version works on both XP and Vista for both IE6 and IE7. IE8 should also work too, but since that browser is still in beta, IE8 support isn’t final yet. If you’re interested in testing the plugin for IE8, there’s also an online group where you can discuss and give comments and feedback.

I just saw that PayPal has an IE plugin that lets you pay for anything on the web with your PayPal account – even on sites that don’t take PayPal! I immediately thought “wow, this is cool!”  - but I then realized that this could also lead to some dangerous impulse shopping. Sometimes the only thing holding me back from a purchase is the fact that I would have to get up and dig through my purse for my credit card. No more! Assuming you have a PayPal account, you can install this plugin, which uses PayPal ‘single use’ credit card numbers to pay for your online purchases. You can also use the plugin to save and print receipts, enter addresses with 1 click, check your PayPal balance, and avoid fraudulent websites. To get access to the plugin, you have to first login to PayPal and go to your profile, where you’ll see a link to “PayPal plug-in” on the menu on the left.

After watching that, I browsed through the related videos, and found this video - an extended hands-on demo of the new version of Windows Mobile, which shows the new "today" screen, the "getting started" wizards, the transfer music option, text messages, settings, and pretty much all the other features, too. Good stuff!